[La Tour's] later work discards the rowdy group scene in favour of individual figures who sit alone by candlelight, in states of heightened privacy and inwardness. In one extraordinary case, known as 'The Flea Catcher', a woman, half-undressed, inspects her body for parasites -- in principle, a very low-life subject indeed, but handled by La Tour so as to suggest a quite different kind of process, a sombre self-assessment, an examination of conscience, a renunciation of the world's show. La Tour's various representations of Mary Magdalene rework the nocturne in the direction of self-scrutinyand penitence; the candle sits next to a skull, and it is the skull, not her own beauty, that the saint pensively considers in the mirror.La Tour exploits to the full the capacity of candlelight to spirit away the world that lies outside its own bright centre,and swallow it up in darkness; it is as though nothing exists beyond the figure's own solitude.

16 comments:

This is tremendous, Tom. Her gaze, as seemingly hollow as that of a skull . . . but, maybe, not quite. The gaze into nothing, or at the body, a kind of something borne of and reduced eventually to nothing -- into & at the mirrors all around.

Brad, the candlelight scenes, with the mirrors particularly, have a way of casting the inessentials into a penumbra of doubt and shadow, with the extraordinary effects of spiritual transformation bestowed by candlelight upon scenes of everyday life creating, in the same moment, a clarity not commonly associated with darkness and nocturnes. Contemplation finds its way in through the skull to the soul. La Tour's ability to use lighting and the meanings of lighting as the basis of his pictures remains astonishing to me, illuminating these unexpected dimensions...

Very beautiful! As well as the skull has a renown symbolic meaning, what does the candle intends to mean? I'm sure it's a symbolic object, but I'm not sure what does it means here (the enlightenment of faith?) I'll have to research this. Very interesting.

In practise, the "vanity" genre came to outgrow its moralistic message. In Northern Europe, especially, the presence of the skull in a still-life became an excellent pretext for introducing all sorts of interesting objects, some symbolic, some not.

About the use of candlelight... of course it's the key to everything, here.

With La Tour, the lighting is at once expressive resource, indicator of inwardness and spiritual illumination, and technical device, advancing the art of painting "backward" -- that is, away from the classical Renaissance presentation of a luminous world, where nothing is hidden from view; a world organized according to principles of clear composition, which allow the viewer to grasp the story as economically as possible, and to see the intended harmonies between figures and objects as they unfold across the painting's surface -- and into the murky obscurities of darkness and shadow.

Caravaggio had begun this exploration of the chiaroscuro mode. The raking shadows spread across Europe from Italy to Spain and Zurbarán. Whether La Tour, who came from the North, had seen any of that work, remains in question. It's been speculated he encountered the idea of painting "night-pictures" during a visit to Rome, or to the studios of painters in Utrecht. Or he might simply have stayed home in Lorraine and absorbed the influence of the "tenebroso" style from local painters. In any event he became the great master of the mode. In his later work, nocturnes dominate. His development of the candlelight pictures was remarkable and unique. Not just in the concentration and intensity, but in the radical reorganization of the elements of tenebrist picture-making.

As to my poem, there's a sort of tenebrous element. It was writ late one rainy night about six weeks after 9/11. "Terror"-- when said by New Yorkers -- kept sounding like "Terra" to me, at that time.

And there was the general sense then, of being in the dark.

(Also ever since.)

Little Prince was a true and veritable god, who too soon after the writing of the poem, sailed off on his barge into the eternal shadows.

Martha, thank you, that's exactly what this was meant to be, something like a stream of music. Of course it helped a lot that La Tour provided the magnificent Variations on a Theme, such a profound source to work with.